Home sweet home

I'm pining for a home that is no more, right now. I grew up in Somerset. My family are still in Somerset. Most of my childhood friends never left. I'm the one who's roamed and wandered and explored as much of the country as possible.

I haven't been back since I visited my mum after after her operation 3 years ago. We haven't visited since because my mother has not, in the 16 years since I left home at 18 ever come to visit me and I lost my patience, finally.

Recent events at this end of the country, where I moved because of a boy, have served a reminder that home is where the heart is and I miss Somerset and my mum really rather a lot.

Unfortunately, it seems I will need to make the journey back alone. But I think it's time to make it no matter how hard it might be. She's not the same after a head lamp post interface - maybe that's why she never calls, never emails, never speaks. I don't know. Maybe she forgets I exist. I don't know that either. But even if my mother doesn't care much, I care about a random sequence of fields which I grew up in, roamed across, fell over in and cycled through.

Yep, it's Glastonbury time. And every year it hurts. It's as much a part of Somerset as the Lord Majors show is part of London. It's a rollicking spread of imagination let loose. It's no edges and no limits. It's sunsets watched slowly while getting quietly drunk. It's dreams made real in crazy sculptures and suits relinquished in favour of tutus and mankinis. It's 4.5 miles of utter insanity and I want to go back because it's tied to me, because it epitomises a lost Somerset which has disintegrated beneath the wheels of a 4 x 4, because you can try and make Glastonbury as refined as you like but it will always always always be about the hippies and the politics and the right to disagree, to me.

I remember how it used to be, I experienced, very briefly, how it used to be and by the sounds of it, Michael Eavis is slowly realising there were merits in how it used to be. It used to be a temporary town called freedom and it needs to be reborn.